


All The King's Daughters

by zealousprince



Category: Cabin Pressure
Genre: Family, Father-Daughter Relationship, Fatherhood, Gen, ordinary people with ordinary problems, sad stories with hopeful endings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-01
Updated: 2012-05-01
Packaged: 2017-11-04 15:38:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/395442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zealousprince/pseuds/zealousprince
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Douglas' daughters grow up without him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All The King's Daughters

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pudupudu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pudupudu/gifts).



> For Pudu, who wanted Douglas fic and got an entire family instead. Thanks to [Chess](http://archiveofourown.org/users/chess_ka/pseuds/chess_ka) for the support and Brit-pick.

His first’s name is Alice. She was eight years old when he left.

 

Even these days – the MJN Era, as he refers to it in his head – Douglas will sometimes wake up in the middle of the night with the sound of her voice in his ears as she screams _Daddy, Daddy don’t go_ at his receding tail lights.

 

It’s one of the biggest regrets of his life. He was young then, fiery, self-absorbed, and unused to betrayal. He wasn’t thinking of anything but his bruised and broken ego when he left his first wife and his first daughter behind.

 

Like anyone would, he lies awake after those memory dreams, and wonders how things could have been different.

Alice is thirty-four  now, and lives in Bristol. She is married and has one child.

 

Douglas has never been to Bristol.

 

=====

 

Katy is the middle child, though she doesn’t really know her older half-sister. She is the one who is most like Douglas. He enjoys this only because it annoys his second wife to no end.

 

When Katy was in year four, she once spent half a day up a tree, tying a rival’s possessions to the top branches instead of attending class. The ensuing meeting with the headteacher was excruciating in about half a dozen ways, but mostly because Katy kept up a stony silence while the wronged party kept up a steady barrage of tears throughout. In the end, nothing much was resolved, but Katy did earn herself a week of being stuck inside during all the breaks to reflect on the nature of her wrongdoings, and to complete the work she had missed during her absence. Douglas kept expecting her to gripe and moan over the verdict, like she always did at home, but this time his girl didn’t say a word on the topic of her punishment.

 

After supper that night (a continuing lecture from her mother, no dessert), Katy broke her surly silence to tell her father, off to the side, about the bullying her best friend had been a victim to at the hands of the girl who had had her pencils and notebooks and emergency socks hung to a tree by coils of twine.

 

“My little ray of justice,” Douglas called her, awkwardly, not really knowing what to say, but Katy grinned and hugged him, so it must have been enough.

 

Of course, the bullying shifted to Katy soon after that, but she wasn’t one to take that lying down, and it soon all died away.

 

A few years later, the wife yelled at him when Katy began to swear in the house, thinking he had taught her how. It was only partly true. Anyway, Katy had stopped listening to him by then. She really was just like him; she had a good head on her shoulders. Perhaps too good a head, at times.

 

Katy was fourteen when Douglas’ second wife was caught in the sitting room with the unpaid intern. Douglas was home early for once and managed to pick Katy up from school on the way.

 

He had brought them both expensive gifts from Indonesia. He had thought himself so happy.

 

He had thought the mistakes of the past were long behind him.

 

He never saw the intern again, but that didn’t mean anything. He forced himself to forget about that. He wasn’t a very youthful man anymore, no longer the cheeky medical student in it for the cheap thrills, no longer the young husband still drunk on the perils and pitfalls of everyday risk. He could make this right if he only just tried harder.

 

So he tried harder.

 

His wife left him a week later. They were out to dinner at the first restaurant he had ever taken her to.

 

Katy cut school to come to see him at work.

 

“Mum wants me to go with her,” she said. She was tugging on the sleeves of her school jumper. It was getting short already. Douglas was fascinated by this because he had never really watched a little girl grow up before.

 

And for a moment it occurred to him to ask Katy to stay with him. He was hardly the best father but he _loved_ her, of course he did, she was his little girl (he hadn’t seen Alice since Christmas, he had met the fiancé then, a Bryan or Benjamin or Benedict), so why shouldn’t he want to be her guardian? This wasn’t his fault, _he_ hadn’t been found cheating in their own sitting room, _he_ was smart enough to not get caught–

 

“Do you want to go with her?” he heard himself asking.

 

Later, he would come to realize the cruelty of this question. Katy stood staring at the ground for a long time. He thought she might cry but she did not.

 

Eventually, his time ran out. He glanced at his watch and cursed silently, hating it, hating this situation, hating his job and not for the first time.

 

“Darling, I have to go,” Douglas said to his second daughter, and she nodded without a word.

 

On the morning when his wife left for good, Katy went with her. They left nothing but the furniture and Douglas’ things behind.

 

Douglas came home at noon to an empty house.

 

=====

 

The daughter he calls on Christmas Day from Molokai is his third. She is Katy’s little sister. He considers her apart from Katy because she is so different from them both.

 

Anna was born after his second wife left Fitton, but it soon became clear from the timing that she could only be his. This was awkward for everybody. Douglas went to attend the birth even though he was ragged with jet lag, but the person she was seeing was in there with her, so Douglas waited outside on a hard plastic chair.

 

The newborn took after his ex-wife more than after him. Gazing at her during a moment where the mother was asleep and the boyfriend was gone to get coffee, Douglas was secretly relieved.

 

The mother named her without asking him for his opinion. She had named Katy so perhaps she had thought it her right to do the same for Anna.

 

Douglas saw her every few months over the next year, and after twelve months was invited, grudgingly, to her first birthday party. He never got to see her first steps or hear her first garbled words.

 

Katy held Anna on her lap for most of the day of the party, Katy who had become lovely and tall and contrary, especially with her mother, which pleased and worried Douglas at the same time (he didn’t want her to turn out like him). Katy knew that both herself and her sister were daughters of the same man and in fact seemed to find a dark delight in the knowledge, like it was some sort of sordid affair she might one day turn to her advantage. She was perfectly pleasant with Douglas, very happy to see him. She doted on her sister at the same time as she made cutting remarks to and about Douglas, treating the whole thing like some merry game. He parried with her gladly, as he asked her about school and marveled at Anna’s constant stream of syllables which the child kept on with complete seriousness, as though delivering a regal speech in a language they were all too stupid to comprehend.

 

All the while, Douglas wondered if this was fatherhood, watching his second daughter grow angrier and more like him every day, watching his third daughter growing up from afar, and forgetting his grown-up first daughter more each passing week even as he remembered her child self each night in darkly-coloured guilt dreams.  

 

Douglas got to hold Anna in his arms for a while, just after the birthday supper. She slept for most of that time, tired out from food and excitement. As the other adults chattered and drank, he strolled around the garden  and looked at the flowers, and cherished the feel of her soft pudgy arms around his neck.

 

Anna cried when she woke up, momentarily not recognizing the man holding her, kicking and screaming and running for Mummy and her new husband, for _Daddy Daddy Daddy_. Douglas watched her go, and watched this other man scoop her up and hold her close, and felt nothing at all.

 

Katy did not come downstairs to say goodbye, even when her stepdad knocked on her bedroom door. Douglas left her un-birthday present – a watch, a hundred pounds in cash – on the mantelpiece, and left.

 

When he called, Anna would call him “Papa”, with deliberate care, so Douglas knew it was a word reserved just for him. He wanted to know if she had thought of it herself or if her mother had supplied it, but he never asked.

 

Katy never wanted to come to the phone. He continued to send her and Anna presents and money.

 

He was fired from Air England when Anna was five. He woke up the next morning with a start, calling for Katy and Anna and Alice in a hoarse voice that did not sound a thing like him.

 

“Who?” Helena asked him in a sleep-blurred voice, because she was the only one there.

 

Douglas told her “no one, dear”, and turned away from her as he pretended to go back to sleep.

 

He had already given up drinking. He called Anna every two weeks, saw Katy and Anna on their birthdays and on holidays, continued to argue wearily with his second wife every time he met her.

 

He did not cheat on Helena.

 

He wanted to talk to Alice, but was afraid.

 

He began to work for MJN.

 

=====

 

In Molokai, Douglas sleeps for a few hours, then dresses quickly and goes down to the lobby to call Anna first thing.

 

“Hullo? Deacon residence, this is Anna Deacon,” she says, answering the phone on her own because that, she once told her father in her same serious voice, is what big girls do.

 

“Hullo, sweetheart. It’s me.”

 

“Oh, hi, Papa. You missed Christmas.”

 

“Yes, I know. I’m very sorry. I had a flight and couldn’t call until now.”

 

“That’s all right. I got your present. Mum didn’t want us to go to the post office to fetch it because she wanted to finish her shopping, but I told her we must, because there’s no point in getting a Christmas present if it’s not Christmas anymore.”

 

Douglas grins, bringing his other hand up over his mouth to hide it from the drowsy girl at the desk. “That’s wonderful, darling.”

 

“Are you coming to see us soon? I know you said you couldn’t for Christmas, but maybe the New Year…”

 

“Erm, yes, yes, I should be able to make it for New Year’s. Do you want to go somewhere? I’ll take you anywhere you like.”

 

Anna gives a wise little chuckle. “Papa, everything will be closed on that day. We won’t have anywhere to go unless you count the pond, but the ducks are all gone because the water’s been frozen for ages.”

 

“Oh. Right. Yes, of course. Well, do you–”

 

He stops when he hears more voices on the other end, a woman’s and then a man’s, too far-off and warped to make out. Douglas waits as Anna replies to them in a suddenly quick and impatient tone, catching snatches of “it’s just Papa” and “no, I’m not finished”, and feels strangely proud.

 

Anna turns back to the receiver and says with a huff, “Dad wants me to hang up now. We’re going to go see Grandmummy. I’m wearing my best dress and everything.”

 

Douglas tries to remember which dress that is, but he can’t. He says, “Oh, you look lovely in that one.”

 

“It itches, Papa.”

 

“You’ll get used to it.”

 

“I _never_ get used to it,” Anna whines, sounding much more like a nine-year-old for it. “And Katy brushed my hair too much so now it stands up.”

 

Douglas’ heart leaps in his chest at the name, and he huddles closer to the receiver, no longer caring whether the desk clerk is listening or not. “Your sister is there? I thought she was on holiday with that boy…Klaus?”

 

“Kevin,” Anna corrects, her snooty big girl voice restored. “No, Kevin dumped her three days before Christmas so she’s here with us. She’s been horrible ever since she got here. At supper yesterday, she was saying that she would rather be in Cuba like she planned, and I told her I’d rather she was too, then she pinched me and I screamed and Mum almost didn’t let us have dessert.”

 

Douglas laughs with one hand over his face, delighted, utterly delighted, and loving his little girl so, so much. “You…Anna, that was, that was not a very nice thing to say. You should apologize to her.”

 

“I shan’t,” Anna says morosely, and Douglas wonders where she learned “shan’t”. “Katy has been horrid ever since she moved to London. It’s like she doesn’t want to be my sister anymore.”

 

“I’m sure that’s not the case.”

 

Anna says nothing. Douglas can just see her in his mind’s eye, standing in her mother’s spotless kitchen in a laced-trimmed frock of his own imagining, with both her small hands curled around the receiver, and with her dark hair sticking up like an angry cat’s and with a pout on her lips. He wants nothing more than to pick her up and hold her tight in his arms, and to feel her own arms come up around his neck in recognition.

 

Anna loves him now, but Katy did once, and Alice as well. If there’s one thing Douglas has learned over the long years, it’s that a man’s daughter will always turn away from him in the end.

 

He wonders if that’s inevitable, if it’s just the way things have to go, or if he still has a chance to save this, to save _them_ , even though he has failed two of them already.

 

“I love you, Anna,” he says quietly into the receiver.

 

Anna falters for a moment, like she’s surprised, but when she answers it’s genuine. “I love you too, Papa.”

 

“I just…I’m sorry I couldn’t be there for Christmas. I really wanted to, you know.”

 

“I know. It’s fine. Flying planes is a lot of work, but I know you’re good at it because they only ask the really good pilots to fly during the holidays,” Anna tells him, and when she uses that voice then by God, Douglas will believe anything she says.

 

Anna seems about to say something else when the adult voices interrupt again, closer and louder this time. Anna says “Wait, I’m not _done_ ,” but the woman says “Anna, stop it, we’re going _now_ ” and Douglas sucks in a breath because it’s Katy.

 

“Bye-bye, Papa,” Anna says hurriedly, sounding like she’s struggling to keep something in her grip, which she probably is. “Please call me again later. Promise!”

 

“I promise. Have fun at Grandmum–”

 

“Hello? Dad, is that you?”

 

“Katy,” says Douglas. The name feels disused on his tongue.

 

Katy sighs down the line, sounding cross. “Dad, you’ve made us late. We’ll be stuck in the evening rush now.”

 

“I’m sorry.”

 

“Yeah. Well, we have to go.”

 

“Yes, of course. I’m sorry about, erm, Kevin.”

 

“What?” Katy snaps, then hesitates. “Oh. Anna told you. Thanks, I guess. Doesn’t matter, he was a stupid git anyway.”

 

“Well, he was a stupid git who was taking you to Cuba.”

 

“Sod him, I can go to Cuba anytime I want. I just thought, since I was nearby anyway–”

 

She stops and huffs again, then restarts in a softer voice. “Look, Dad, I haven’t seen you in a while. Are you even in Britain right now?”

 

“No. Hawaii.”

 

“Hah. Do they even have Christmas there?”

 

“Of a sort. Nothing like a good old English Christmas, of course.”

 

“Of course,” Katy agrees, and there’s a smile in her voice that Douglas hasn’t heard in ages. “Look, we really do have to go. Come see us when you get back from sunny Hawaii.”

 

“I will.”

 

They hang up. Douglas exhales slowly.

 

He’s failed them. He’s allowed himself to become used to the knowledge that he is a terrible father and used it as an excuse to not move forward, but now he finally, _finally_ sees. Anna has shown him. Katy has shown him. And now he can show someone else.

 

Douglas takes out his mobile and clicks through the contact list until he finds the right entry, and carefully punches the number into the hotel desk phone. Then, he puts the receiver to his ear, and waits to hear Alice’s voice.


End file.
